Free Golden Vows by Karen Toller Whittenburg Page B

hurts that went unspoken and unresolved. A gradual undermining of the love that bound them together in understanding. And she had ignored the signs of trouble, pretended that the only problem they faced was conceiving a child.
    Amanda tried to stop the memory. She tried to concentrate on the rustling sounds of approaching night, on the full moon just coming into its own as the sunlight faded across the horizon. But she heard the plaintive song of the whippoorwill and she remembered....
    She had always wanted children and hadn’t considered that wanting didn’t necessarily fulfill the desires of the heart. Dane had said he wanted children, too, but he thought they should wait. “We’ve been married only two years,” he had reasoned with her. “You’ve just begun your career. Let’s wait a little longer.”
    But she had known he didn’t really mean it; he just didn’t understand how a baby would enrich their marriage. She had known, though, and she hadn’t hesitated to cajole him into agreement. It hadn’t taken long to convince him or to convince herself that he was as happy with the decision as she.
    Amanda kicked blindly at a tuft of grass in her path. Oh, she had thought she knew all the answers then. Everything was just the way she wanted, all was right with her world. She and Dane shared something special, something out of the ordinary, and a baby would be a culmination of that, a fulfillment of their love for each other.
    In her mind it had all been so simple, but it hadn’t been simple at all.
    Like the changing seasons she had changed, and with each barren month came impatience and frustration and a deepening of the insatiable yearning within her. Dane had been understanding at first. He had comforted her, reassured her, sympathized with her during the endless medical tests. He had teased her out of melancholy and made her hope again. He had bribed her laughter with gifts and extra attention. But after a while she couldn’t be reassured or teased or bribed and he gradually stopped trying.
    It had been fatally easy to misinterpret those early signs of resentment. She had told herself that because he was a man he couldn’t really identify with her desperate longing to bear his child. How could he truly understand that a baby, their baby, would be worth all the waiting and the frustrating disappointment they were facing? She had been foolishly, naively confident that everything would be all right again ... just as soon as she became pregnant.
    The cottage came into view as a welcome interruption to the memories. Amanda opened the door but didn’t go inside. Instead, she lingered on the porch, consciously placing her fingers on the railing where she had last seen Dane rest his hand.
    She had wished many times that she could go back and erase the mistakes she’d made. If she had only realized then that they needed to talk about their feelings openly and honestly. But the prospect of never being able to give him a child frightened her, made her feel less of a woman, and she couldn’t admit that ... not even to him. So she pretended there was nothing wrong, that the widening gap between them wasn’t really there.
    A heavy sigh wafted from her throat into the night air as Amanda leaned against the railing. Now she realized how blind she had been. Too obsessed with her desire for motherhood to realize that she was losing Dane.
    It was hard to admit that she had been wrong about his feelings from the beginning, but Amanda knew that must have been the case. Dane hadn’t really wanted the baby. Oh, she had no doubts that he would have been a loving, responsible father. But he hadn’t really wanted or needed the role of parent. And in the end he had gotten his wish.
    Somehow that realization hurt more now than it had at the time, but in light of everything that had happened, she couldn’t put any other interpretation on it. Dane had resented her longing to become pregnant; he had resented the pregnancy and he